A couple of days ago I went to the local auto parts store to buy a new muffler for our van. While my nephew, Don, was looking for the right one in the book I sat on a stool waiting for him. A few minutes went by when two fellows came into the store to buy something. As the first one was talking to another clerk the second one kind of looked me over but didn't say anything at first. As I looked his way he said, "excuse me but aren't you Bill Wandke?" I said "yes" and he said "you probably don't remember me but we worked together quite a few years ago," and he introduced himself. I then recognized him as a young fellow that I worked with in 1980.

His voice was almost a whisper and I had to keep asking him to repeat what he was saying when he finally explained that he couldn't talk any louder because he has throat cancer. He then took off his cap exposing a bald head. He had just completed chemotherapy. He was upbeat about it and said that the doctors said that he should be okay. As I was telling him that I was sorry that he was having health problems he went on to tell me that he had hurt his back so bad that he would never work again. This made me kind of uncomfortable so to change the subject I asked him if he saw his father-in-law much since he moved to Port Townsend. He said not much, but he knew that he had had two heart attacks. This brings me to the subject of this story! His father-in-law is Roger !

When I left the parts store I couldn't help but think about Roger, and the things we did together thirty years ago. He is a couple years younger than I am and a little fellow who has always been active and a real nut. I can't visualize him as having had a heart attack. I can only see him doing the things we did back then! I'll bet he is regretting not being able to do the things we did way back then too, just like I do now.

I came to Forks in 1968 to work in the cedar mills. Anyone who has relocated knows that one of the things you have to do is make new friends. Generally it is through your job, but in this case it was through my new girl friend, Helen. I had been in Forks for six months before I had met Helen as most of my off hours I spent in the bars trying to see just how much I could drink and still function. Some days I made it and others I didn't but on this day I made it because I met her and things got better!

Helen was then a bookkeeper and did some tax work besides her regular job for some extra income. Roger and his wife was one of her clients that she did tax work for. One day Roger came by to drop off some papers for their taxes and we were introduced. We found out that we had one thing in common, we both loved to fish and this began a friendship that took us into some pretty crazy situations. That is really the subject of this story:

To give you an idea how good of friends we became, Roger and his wife stood up for Helen and I when we got married. Not only that, we took them on our three day honeymoon. Separate rooms of course!

One hot summer afternoon Roger came by and wanted to know if Helen and I wanted to float the Sol Duc river and do some trout fishing. Hell, I was game and Helen was too, so off we went. Roger was in half ownership with another guy in a river boat and this would be our river transportation. He had a two ton Chevy flat bed that served as the trailer for the boat. I can't believe that we actually put that boat up on that truck alone. But we did, many times!

You have to understand that Helen and I didn't know anything about floating a river and were completely, at Roger's mercy. We put the boat in the river and started fishing. We caught a few fish but the excitement for us was just floating the river. About an hour later, as we were drifting along, we accidentally drifted up on a big flat rock in the middle of the river. The damn thing was flat on top and was level with the water on the upper side. The other side was about a foot or so higher so when we slid up on it the boat laid on its side and started to fill with water. This was when I found out that Helen couldn't swim a lick! Roger and I went over the side to stabilize the boat and we put Helen on the top of this flat rock. We gave her our fishing gear and the fish and then we floated the boat that was full of water to the shore where we emptied it out. We then went back, picked her up and was on our way. I can only imagine how Helen felt sitting on that rock in the middle of the river not knowing how to swim!

By this time it was about 7:00 p.m. and I asked how much farther we had to go in order to get to the take out spot. (I should add here that when you float rivers you should have a vehicle at both ends so you aren't stranded when you get through with the float!) Roger said it wasn't far and I left it at that. Hell, I didn't know. I've never been here before!

At 9:30 p.m. we still haven't reached the take out place and it is dark. Its kind of eerie to hear the rapids and not see them so Helen and I said that we would rather walk out and get the boat the next day. Roger agreed and we beached the boat and spent the next two hours walking through the woods to the car. We got home around midnight. Roger didn't think a thing about it, he thought it was funny!

I probably should have seen the writing on the wall then and found a new friend to fish with but, hell, I liked the guy!

Its been a long time ago, so, I don't remember if it was the same summer or the next, but, Roger called and wanted to know if I wanted to float the upper Sol Duc. I told him I would and I drove out to Beaver where he lived and off we went. We put the boat in the water above where the fish hatchery is now and floated down to where Frenchy's Tavern is. Probably a ten mile float. It was mid to late summer and the river was low and fishing was poor because the water was so clear. We ended up just floating the river rather than fishing.

Anyone who has floated the Sol Duc knows that it has many deep holes and as clear as it was we could drift through these holes and see all kinds of tackle that other fishermen had lost as well as schools of fish that wouldn't bite our bait. So to pass the time as we drifted Roger would dive into the water, sometimes as deep as 10-12 feet and retrieve lures. By the end of the day we had a nice collection of tackle. Of course, none of this tackle we had would catch these fish we kept seeing in these deep holes so our next goal was to find out what kind of fish these were.

When we got to the take out spot we took my car and drove back to where we put the boat in and got Roger's truck so we could take it back for the boat. As we were driving through Beaver we noticed Roger's brother driving out of the road going to Roger's place. When he saw us he turned around and came after us. Roger pulled off the road in order to see what he wanted. His brother pulled up behind us and Roger got out and headed for the car. I don't know why but I got out as well and went to see what was going on. As I walked between the back of the truck and the car heading for the drivers side Roger had just walked up to the drivers window. His brother then stuck a .357 Magnum pistol out the window. Roger shouted, "what in hell are you doing with my gun?" At the same instant I lunged for the gun as it went off. The bullet whistled by Roger's head as I grabbed the brother's wrist with my left hand while grabbing the pistol with my right hand. After I had the gun secured Roger proceeded to drag his brother out of the car an beat the living hell out of him. Here I am standing with this pistol in my hand and Roger is beating up his brother in the middle of Hidhway 101 while traffic is driving by on the shoulder in order to get through. That must have been quite a sight! Now I guess, they would just shrug their shoulders and say, "the natives are restless today!"

The long and the short of that deal is Roger and his brother had gone to Alaska looking for work and apparently the brother was fooling around up there and when he got home his wife already knew about it. He assumed that Roger was the culprit and decided to kill him with his own gun! (As it turned out it was Roger's brother-in-law who was the guilty party!)

We had him arrested and when we went to his hearing he wondered what I was doing there. We told him that I was the one who took the gun away from him and he couldn't believe it! I guess everything was such a blur to him that he didn't remember anything.

The outcome of that was Roger dropped the charges and his brother was detained in a mental hospital for six weeks where they determined he was okay. They said he was drunk when he went into the rage. He got probation. He later came to me and thanked me for taking the gun away from him. He died about three years ago and we remained friends throughout the years!

A few of weeks later Roger called again and he told me that he had what we needed to find out what those fish were that we couldn't get to bite. I said "great, when do we go!" He said right away and off I went back to Beaver to meet him to find out what he had that would catch these fish.

I kind of hate to admit this but what he had was five sticks of dynamite, three feet of fuse and three caps to ignite them. Neither one of us would do this now but at the time it seemed like the thing to do!

We put the boat in the water and drifted about a mile where we came to the first big hole. There weren't any of the fish we were looking for but there was one big King salmon in there so we decided we would experiment with that one. Not knowing what in hell we were doing we took a half stick of the dynamite and touched it off. When it hit the water it scared the big fish out of the hole and when the powder blew it made a small puff and that was it! Our first attempt was a failure! It was obvious that we needed to work on our plan because now we only had two caps and 4 1/2 sticks of dynamite left. It was obvious, too, that we had to be more selective. We drifted a long ways before we came to a place where we found a school of the fish we were looking for. We rigged up a whole stick and a half this time and threw it in the water but this time there was too much current and the powder drifted out of the pool and made a slightly louder noise with no fish to show for our effort!

We now knew that it looked easier than it really was to blow a hole and get the fish. We needed to refine our strategy and come up with a better plan. We now had but one fuse left. The plan was to find a really deep hole with fish in it and then throw the three sticks of dynamite in the current above the hole. We would row the boat to the lower end of the hole and scare the fish back into the deeper water.

Well, it worked like a charm, the three sticks blew that hole almost empty. When the smoke cleared we were at the lower end of the hole and all we could see was fish floating on the top of the water coming our way. I told Roger that we had to get them all because we didn't want anyone down stream finding any fish floating on the water. So he went over the side and retrieved fish and he threw them to me as I rowed the boat down stream with him.

When we got home we had about a dozen and a half of Sockeye salmon weighing about 3-5 pounds apiece. Looking back on this it isn't something I'm real proud of but it happened and it is part of the time I spent with Roger!

You will be glad to hear the dynamite thing was a one time deal but our fishing wasn't. We continued to fish the rivers in the area as well as the ocean at LaPush and at Sekiu on the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

The last memory that sticks in my mind is a time when we decided to fish the Hoh River. This time we would take his family, his wife and six kids, and Helen who had two kids. We would camp along the river and Roger and I would fish during the day. You need to know that the Hoh is a fast flowing river in the summer because it is glacier fed. Once again, Roger is leading and I'm the follower!

No boat this time, we are going to fish the bank. There is one problem though, we took one of the cars about 4-5 miles down river so once we started we were committed to fish to the other car. If you have ever fished a river or stream you know your intention is to stay dry if at all possible. This was our plan too, but we hadn't gone too far and we found that the going was pretty brushy and there was a nice gravel bar on the other side, soooooo, yep, you guessed it, we swam the damn river!

Now we are as wet as you can get and we have a long way to go to the other car so the logical thing for us to do was to swim the current between holes in order to cover ground faster. We had made it about half way to the other rig when we came to a real long drift that we decided not to fish, mainly because fishing wasn't real good and we were tired, cold and wet. As we are floating/swimming down this drift we could see this fellow sitting on the bank with his pole propped on a stick, fishing. We decided to see how close we could get to him before he spotted us. Well, we drifted within 20 feet of his pole and the old guy never saw us. When we got out of the water at the lower end of the pool we made a big joke out of it because it was the highlight of our day up to this point. We thought it would have been funny if we would have grabbed his line on the way by, but quickly decided that wouldn't have been smart because a lot of people carry guns with them when they are out alone.

As we got close to the place where the other car was parked we found ourselves, once again, on the wrong side of the river. It just happened to be about 150 feet across and about 4-5 feet deep. It didn't look too bad but when we started out with our fish poles and tackle we realized we had made a mistake. We had no choice but to let the river take us as we slowly made our way across. When we finally got to the other side we were nearly a half mile below where we wanted to be!

Roger and I spent a lot of the next few years fishing together, but, as most of you know things change. Not necessarily by choice, things just change! I still consider Roger a friend even though I haven't seen him in ten years. I guess what makes me feel good is even though our youth is gone we made good use of it when we had it! If you didn't have a Roger in your life at some point, the only thing I can say is, "You really missed out on a fun and crazy experience!

Roger and Me!